[Salon] China moots Himalayan ark project to survive climate ‘tipping point’, with some AI help

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

China moots Himalayan ark project to survive climate ‘tipping point’, with some AI help

As the threat of global climate collapse grows, Beijing is considering a plan to turn the Tibetan Plateau into an agricultural stronghold

Reading Time:3 minutes

Stephen Chenin Beijing

Published: 2:13pm, 23 Mar 2025

The plot of the Hollywood doomsday film, 2012 – where China builds survival arks on the Tibetan Plateau – is edging closer to reality with Beijing’s latest plan for getting through a global climate catastrophe.

Alarmed by accelerating global climate collapse, Chinese government scientists have proposed transforming the “roof of the world” into an agricultural stronghold.

It is a move that underscores Beijing’s increasing desperation in the face of looming ecological tipping points.

In a solemnly worded report published in Chinese-language journal Climate Change Research on March 4, the National Climate Centre (NCC) in Beijing warned that cascading climate breakdown – including the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, Atlantic Ocean currents and polar ice sheets – could destabilise global food systems within decades.

Their answer? According to the report, rapidly scaling up high-altitude farming on the Tibetan Plateau could enable the nation to survive the global disaster.

“Several climate tipping elements are approaching critical thresholds. It will have profound and extensive impacts on the Earth and its inhabitants – ranging from unprecedented sea-level rises to extreme weather events that render regions uninhabitable and overwhelm existing adaptive capacities,” wrote Ma Lijuan, senior NCC engineer and lead author of the study.

“The Tibetan Plateau, recognised as the engine of environmental change in Asia, plays vital roles in water conservation, soil retention, wind breaking and sand fixation, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity preservation. Serving as a critical ecological security barrier for China and Asia, it is also a globally significant hotspot for biodiversity conservation.

“By rigorously protecting its ecological environment and leveraging its unique natural and socio-economic conditions to develop plateau-specific agriculture, it is entirely feasible to turn the Tibetan Plateau into China’s future granary,” Ma and her colleagues wrote.

The NCC, operating under the China Meteorological Administration, serves as China’s premier institution for climate monitoring, research and policy advice.

What worries the agency most is polar meltdown. Greenland now sheds around 30 million tonnes of ice each hour, while Antarctica’s ice shelves fracture like shattered glass.

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It is predicted that the sudden increase of fresh water in the oceans could lead to current collapse. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – the ocean mechanism responsible for moving heat energy around the planet and thus regulating Earth’s climate – had weakened to an alarming low, with estimates that it could collapse by as early as 2050, Ma’s team warned.

Meanwhile, vast swathes of trees are dying in the Amazon due to drought as well as fires ravaging the rainforest. The “lungs of the Earth” now emit more carbon than they absorb, according to recent studies.

Across Siberia, erupting methane geysers are destabilising landscapes and resurrecting ancient pathogens. In Australia, the Great Barrier Reef has bleached catastrophically – with increasing frequency in recent years – with its fish populations also vanishing.

And monsoon mayhem is already at China’s doorstep: the Indian Ocean Dipole, which influences weather patterns in the Indo-Pacific region, see-saws between extremes, triggering deadly floods in Pakistan and crop-killing droughts along China’s Yangtze River.

The NCC’s plan leans into paradoxical climate shifts: while rising temperatures scorch tropical farmlands, Tibet’s once-frigid plains are wetting up and warming twice as fast as the global average.

Glacial meltwater now irrigates valleys where frost once ruled year-round. Growing seasons have expanded by 34 days since 1980, according to some studies.

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The warming climate has come at the same time as an agricultural technology revolution. Scientists have created new cold-resistant barley strains that yield crops at an altitude of 5,000 metres (16,400 feet) – a feat previously thought impossible.

China has also achieved a milestone in potato cultivation, with yields surpassing ‌75 tonnes per hectare on the plateau, or twice the productivity of lower lands, thanks to superb sun conditions at the high altitude.

This feat, driven by ‌cold-resistant hybrid varieties‌ and advanced agricultural techniques including optimised soil management, greenhouse adaptations and precision irrigation, addresses historical limitations of low productivity in extreme environments, according to state media reports.

But the vision is not without challenges. Rampant mining and other human activities are threatening ecological sustainability on the plateau, and the melting ice has the potential of causing lakes and dams to collapse, which in turn would put new settlers at risk, according to Ma’s team.

But Beijing is doubling down. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be used to monitor real-time data from vast numbers of sensors planted across the plateau to predict glacial floods and optimise crop rotations, according to the researchers.

“This is an engineering project of a large and complex system; we need the assistance of AI,” they said.

Stephen Chen

Stephen Chen is the SCMP's science news editor. He investigates major research projects in China, a new power house of scientific and technological innovation, and their impact to